Brief Interviews With Hideous Men Quotes

"Happy Birthday. Your thirteenth is important. Maybe your first really public day."

"You have seven hairs in your left armpit now. Twelve in your right."

"Your voice is rich and scratchy and moves between octaves without any warning."

"Your face has begun to get shiny when you don’t wash it."

"And dreams. For months there have been dreams like nothing before."

"Your party is tonight. This afternoon, on your birthday, you have asked to come to the pool."

"Your family likes you. You are bright and quiet, respectful to elders."

"Forget your towel. Stopping for the towel means talking and talking means thinking."

"You have decided being scared is caused mostly by thinking."

"Each of your footprints is thinner and fainter. Each shrinks behind you on the hot stone and disappears."

"She wished to hear, with no holds barred, the brutally honest opinion of her as a person, the potentially negative and judging and hurtful parts as well as the positive and affirming and supportive and nurturing parts."

"For she was frightened, the depressed person confessed, profoundly, unprecedentedly frightened by what she was beginning to feel she was seeing and learning and getting in touch with about herself."

"The depressed person was frightened for herself, for as it were 'herself' — i.e., for her own so-called 'character' or 'spirit' or as it were 'soul'."

"She trusted her, she assured her. For she had decided, she said, that her very life itself, however fraught with agony and despair and indescribable loneliness, depended, at this point in her journey toward true healing, on inviting — even if necessary laying aside all possible pride and defense and begging for — the judgment of certain trusted and very carefully selected members of her supportive community."

"The depressed person here paused momentarily to insert the additional fact that she had firmly resolved to herself to ask this potentially deeply traumatizing question without the usual pathetic and irritating defense-mechanisms of preamble or apology or interpolated self-criticism."

"What cleared his forehead’s lines was a type of revelation."

"This is the younger sister of his wife’s college roommate. Everyone else has gone to the mall, some to shop, some to see a movie at the mall’s multiplex."

"She sees his color heighten and forehead go smooth in a kind of revelation — why she’d begged off the mall, the meaning of certain comments, looks, distended moments over the weekend he’d thought were his vanity, imagination."

"Her breasts stop their slight tremble and sway when she stops. She’s now on the same side of the bed but not yet right up against him."

"‘It’s not what you think,’ he says. His eyes never leave the middle distance between the ceiling and themselves."

"Because if you can really see somebody just as a thing you can do anything to him, all bets are off, humanity and dignity and rights and fairness—all bets are off."

"What if I told you she said it wasn’t the violation or the terror or the pain or any of that, that it—that the biggest part, afterwards, of trying to like structure her mind around it, to fit what happened into the world of her, that the worst part the hardest part of it was now knowing she could think of herself that way too if she wanted?"

"I’m calm, don’t worry about me. It’s like Frankl’s thing of learning it’s not automatic, how it’s a matter of choice to be a human being with sacred rights instead of a thing or a rat."

"Then it’s showtime, believe you me baby, which believe me everybody that’s never had that kind of total attack and violation happen where everything they thought they were just automatically born with that smugly lets them walk around assuming they’re automatically more than a thing gets skinned off and folded up and put in a Jack Daniel’s bottle and shoved up your ass by four drunk guys who your suffering and violation was just their idea of fun, a way to kill a couple hours, no big deal."

"Which most people with dignity and humanity and rights and all that there don’t ever get to know. What’s possible. That nothing is automatically sacred."

"It’s through suffering and terror and the Dark Side that whatever’s left gets to open up, and then after that you know."

"Two late-stage terminal drug addicts sat up against an alley’s wall with nothing to inject and no means and nowhere to go or be. Only one had a coat. It was cold, and one of the terminal drug addicts’ teeth chattered and he sweated and shook with fever. He seemed gravely ill."

"Sometimes the husband would arise at night and use the master bathroom and then go out to his workshop off the garage and try to unwind for an hour or two with his hobby of furniture refinishing."

"The old trouble with swallowing sometimes returned. She felt herself becoming obsessed with the suspicion that her husband maybe took no genuine pleasure in their lovemaking together but was concentrated only on making her feel pleasure, forcing her to feel pleasure and passion."

"The stakes of the Foreign Currency Game were high, and his study downstairs remained locked when not in use."

"The sunlight through the big window was noon-colored."

"The young wife cleared her throat several times in her special way."

"Galvanic crisis notwithstanding, Jeni Roberts felt awkward."

"Three weeks ago, I did a nice thing for someone."

"Instantly, having cautiously rehearsed for such a possibility at great lengths, already, I said, coolly, and without emotion, 'no.'"

"In other words, what they want from a guy is passion."

"I love love love them. I love to hear them giggle, the different little sounds."

"It was as a child, while watching this television program, that I experienced my first erotic sensations."

"In brief, S-NN comprised an ingeniously simple 24-hr low-overhead loop of mythopoeia mined at 10¢/$1 from the loded stockrooms of the BBC’s toga’d & grape-leafy mythophilic period 1961–7."

"History was dead. Linearity was a cul de sac. Novelty was old news."

"The national I was now about flux & eternal return. Difference in sameness."

"‘I.e., the Medium would handle the Message’s P.R."

"The sort of glorious girl whose kiss tastes of liquor when she’s had no liquor to drink. Cassis, berries, gumdrops, all steamy and soft. Quote unquote."

"Fear gripped her soul the moment she got in. And sure enough, the fellow in the car soon exits the highway and exits off into some kind of secluded area."

"She was not melodramatic about it but described herself as literally paralyzed with terror."

"Something about his aspect, eyes, the quote energy field in the car—she said she instantly knew in the depths of her soul that the fellow’s intention was to brutally rape, torture, and kill her."

"She had an unexpected ability to recount it in such a way as to deflect attention from herself and displace maximum attention onto the anecdote itself."

"The qualities I found myself admiring in her narration of the anecdote were some of the same qualities about her I’d been contemptuous of when I’d first picked her up in the park."

"She seemed truly poseless in relating it, open to attention but not solicitous—nor contemptuous of the attention, or affecting disdain or contempt, which I hate."

"Her speaking voice is a neutral alto without squeak or that long drawled O or vague air of nasal complaint."

"Her laugh was fully adult, full, good to hear."

"I found myself hearing expressions like fear gripping her soul, unquote, as less as televisual clichés or melodrama but as sincere if not particularly artful attempts simply to describe what it must have felt like."